So I figured I haven't really contributed anything at all to this community, so here is a little stylized fire based on the particle object. It's a heavily modified version of the fire demo that was on here. I changed the texture to something more fire looking, and modified it a lot to be a little smaller and have tiny sparks floating around it/through it. I was amazed what a simple texture could do to diversify the particles once I was through.

Yeah, stylized fire, maybe for a cartoon looking game or something.

If you modify the display angle turn randomizer you can get much different effects, possibly more realistic or out of control looking.

Hey man that's great! It becomes VERY usable even on a slower machine if you make it a realistic size for what your average game might call for. I reduced the rate to about 30, and the random width to about 30 and the random size to 10... then it became the perfect size for a pixel perfect inferno and ran perfectly on my laptop. PERFECT!

Well to be honest, I don't know lol. My monster PC lives at my friends house since I am there frequently, I get to use it more there than if it were at home. I will check it out next time I go to visit him, which will most likely be Friday night at this point. I'm guessing around 400+ fps?

Either that or the GPU you have matches only a fraction of the potential the CPU provides.

The fact that it doesn't support multi core is what I'm getting at... it would perform better on a dual core since the base core speed is much faster. The thing that holds my PC back is software that doen;t use the technology to it's full potential.

I am seriously considering "downgrading" to a dual core CPU until more software comes out that uses multi core.

My GPU is the fastest GPU available on the market to date... and I have two of them... so there is no bottle neck there. It is the sheer difference in Ghz of my CPU. If I overclock from 2.5Ghz core to 2.8 I go from 250 fps to around 320fps... so if I go buy a 3.2Ghz extreme edition CPU, put liquid nitrogen through a liquid cooling system, and overclock is to 5.7Ghz, I will be getting somewhere around 1000fps?

Who cares anyway... 250 fps is way faster than anyone needs it to be. It's weird because it runs at the same speed as Assassins Creed on full settings :/

And my point is that because of how few programs support multi-core still, you could have 100 of the best gpus on the market and it still won't match the potential of your CPU ... see what I'm saying?

I ran Crysis on a quad core CPU versus a dual core, with the same clock speed. The results for me were that the fps were the same 90% of the time, until a lot of physics occurred at once, leading to the quad core giving around 5 fps more.

I don't support blowing a lot of money on a computer because A. it will be outdated in 6 months and B. companies won't utilize it for much longer, making the technology cheaper by the time they do.

Partly the reason why I just do everything on a laptop now. It cost half the price of a good desktop PC, plays Crysis on high at 30 fps and is portable.

More power to you if you're Bill Gates in disguise - I guess I'd have 100 PC's for no reason then if I was.